So Much To Think About

Why is there a ‘D’ in fridge, but not in refrigerator? 

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Nobody is wrong 100% of the time. Always look for the nugget of truth in those you disagree with.Nobody is right 100% of the time. Always look for the faults and mistakes in those you agree with.
Mark Manson

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one of my favorite Billy Connolly gags: “Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away — and you’ve got their shoes.”

Scot McKnight

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Relevance

As we’ve all come to see, the hunger for continued relevance is the corroding lust that devours the very old.

David Brooks

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Colorado football

In The Washington Post, Rick Reilly, a native of Boulder, Colo., and a graduate of the University of Colorado, exulted in the early-season promise of its football team, the Buffaloes, by noting their awful past. “A couple of years ago, a buddy said he left two Buffs tickets on his desk at work and somebody broke in overnight and left two more,” he wrote, going on to note that Colorado lost to Minnesota by 42 points in 2022. “Most schools could start the faculty against Minnesota and not lose by 42 points.” Part of the problem, he suggested, is how inhospitably monoracial Boulder, where the university is, can feel to Black players: “We are whiter than Tucker Carlson eating a Wonder Bread mayonnaise sandwich at Cracker Barrel.”

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Kindness

For years I’ve kept posted on the back of my office door a journal entry from one of my students. The student wrote:

I once encountered a woman in Walgreen’s who I swear changed my life.  I was there buying some film for my 35mm and maybe some lip gloss, just normal Walgreen’s stuff;  she was working at the cosmetic counter.  When I gave her my things, she looked at them and said, ‘I think I have a coupon for both of those,’ reached under the counter, and pulled up this lunch bag full of coupons in little baggies.  I asked her why she has so many coupons and what she was doing with them (out of curiosity) and she said she cuts them out of coupon books and keeps them under her counter to give people she checks out.  ‘Times are hard,’ was her only explanation, ‘and all we can do in this world is help each other.’

What the basic postures of kindness do, it seems to me, are to situate ourselves along with the grain of the universe: life teaches us that all is gift, all is grace. None of us are self-sufficient. None of us are “self-made men” or “self-made women.” Indeed, times are always, in some way or the other, hard. Such is life. To practice kindness is to acknowledge all these realities, and is a sweet salve, easing life’s daily challenges and hardships

Lee Camp

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Listening

Listening well is not simply hearing the words being said, it’s also feeling the emotions being felt. People usually don’t want solutions as much as they just want to be understood.

Mark Manson

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Loneliness 

Loneliness crushes the soul, but researchers are finding it does far more damage than that. It is linked to strokes, heart disease, dementia, inflammation and suicide; it breaks the heart literally as well as figuratively.

Loneliness is as deadly as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and more lethal than consuming six alcoholic drinks a day, according to the surgeon general of the United States, Dr. Vivek Murthy. Loneliness is more dangerous for health than obesity, he says — and, alas, we have been growing more lonely. A majority of Americans now report experiencing loneliness, based on a widely used scale that asks questions such as whether people lack companionship or feel left out.

Nick  Kristof

The wrongness of being right

Truth matters. I want to be clear that I believe that. But knowing truth, and being wise about when kindness and mercy matter more than correcting theological error or ignorance, is an important skill to hone. Because I want to be right. I want to fix you so much it’s literally painful at times. I’m a sick, sick puppy who’s not near as smart as he thinks he is. But I’m learning that the need to be right on every little thing—even when it comes from noble intentions—obliterates my ability to speak the ultimate Truth. 

Chad West

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Modernity

According to Charles Taylor, the modern “secular age” lives in the “immanent frame,” a disenchanted culture that has lost touch with transcendent sources of meaning. We’ve lost the metaphysical framework that tells us who we are and where we are going.

The modern person is abandoned, therefore, to their choices, radically free to make decisions and chart a direction in life but without a map or any compelling reason to navigate in a particular direction. There is no “point” to anything, just you and your choices. Any meaning or telos for your life is the one you choose for yourself. There is no grand narrative or plotline you’re being caught up in. Life is, rather, a Choose-Your-Own adventure novel.

Richard Beck

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Individualized Christians

For Christians this individualized concept of the self undermines many of the primary realities of the faith. The Church cannot be rightly understood as a voluntary association. We are Baptized “into the Body of Christ.” The modern concept of the individual runs deeply contrary to Scriptural teaching on the nature of the Christian life. The sacraments, whose foundations rest within a world in which true communion and participation are possible, become more and more foreign to the individualized Christian experience. The sacraments are either deeply minimized (even to the point of extinction) or re-interpreted in voluntaristic terms. It is this re-interpretation of the sacraments that undergirds the modern notion of “open communion,” or “Eucharistic hospitality.” The exclusion of persons from the Cup of Christ is seen as an insult, a denial of their self-defined Christian identification. I have been told, “Who are you to say that I should not be allowed to come to communion?” However, “Individual communion” is an oxymoron.

Fr Stephen Freeman

STILL ON THE JOURNEY